At first inspection, genre seems like a simple system: a series of categories, a means of sorting ideas. But genre has proven far more malleable and complex than this sentence suggests.
In her 2007 article for PMLA, Wai Chee Dimock begins with a series of questions:
“What exactly are genres? Are they a classifying system matching the phenomenal world of objects, a sorting principle that separates oranges from apples? Or are they less than that, a taxonomy that never fully taxonomizes, labels that never quite keep things straight? What archives come with genres, what critical lexicons do they offer, and what maps do they yield? And how does the rise of digitization change these archives, lexicons, and maps?” (1377) [1]
Later, Dimock asks: “If genres are vehicles that “actively generate and shape knowledge of the world” (Frow), what would students learn if literature were taught under this rubric?” (p.1383)
To begin with a discussion of genre is to suggest that we think about genre as, in fact, a “field of knowledge”. But Dimock’s questions are more subtle. There is an enormous difference between Wuthering Heights and Little Women, despite their relative historical proximity, the fact that both are authored by women, and the notion that both are generically categorized as novels.
This is where we begin to think about other generic categories: the gothic novel; the family novel.
“Theorists from Benedetto Croce to Jacques Derrida have long objected to the concept of genre, pointing out that something as dynamic as literature can never be anatomized ahead of time, segregated by permanent groupings. “[I]nstead of asking before a work of art if it be expressive and what it expresses,” genre criticism only wants to label it, putting it into a pigeonhole, asking only “if it obey the laws of epic or of tragedy.” Nothing can be more misguided, Croce says, for these “laws of the kinds” have never in fact been ob served by practicing writers. Derrida makes the same point: “As soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity.” Such border policing is an exercise in futility, he says, for the law of genre is an impossible law; it contains within itself a “principle of contamination,” so much so that the law is honored only in its breach.” (p.1377)
René Wellek and Austin Warren suggested in 1956 that we conceive of genre as matching matter and form, topic and treatment: “Genre should be conceived, we think, as a grouping of literary works based, theoretically, upon both outer form (specific metre or structure) and also upon inner form (attitude, tone, purpose – more crudely, subject and audience). The ostensible basis may be one or the other (e.g., “pastoral” and “satire” for the inner form; dipodic verse and Pindaric ode for outer); but the critical problem will then be to find the other dimension, to complete the diagram.” [2]
Lyric, as a poetic form, is both one of the “oldest” named genres and one that is chameleon-like in its appearances. In the following pages, we will encounter poetry that will seem both familiar and strange. The examples provided will be both like and unlike each other.
In preparation for these encounters, we will be examining lyric as a genre – not to define the genre, but to ask what it might be. Stephen Burt’s article “What is this thing called lyric?” will jumpstart our discussion.
